"art" entries

Joshua at Seven on Seven — Delicious creator Joshua Schachter participated in a Rhizome “Seven on Seven” recently. He was paired with artist Monica Narula and together they explored guilt and absolution with the help of the Mechanical Turk. Check out the presentation PDF for the quick summary.

How to Align Researcher Incentives with Outcomes (Cameron Neylon) — the open science data movement battles entrenched forces for closedness. We need more sophisticated motivators than blunt policy instruments, so we arrive at metrics. […] What might the metrics we would like to see look like? I would suggest that they should focus on what we want to see happen. We want return on the public investment, we want value for money, but above all we want to maximise the opportunity for research outputs to be used and to be useful. We want to optimise the usability and re-usability of research outputs and we want to encourage researchers to do that optimisation. Thus if our metrics are metrics of use we can drive behaviour in the right direction. It sounds good, but I have one question: I remember The Rise of Crowd Science. Alex Szalay didn’t have to change researcher incentives to promote shared astronomical data. I’d ask: what can the other sciences learn from astronomy?

Appcelerator — open source platform for building native mobile and desktop apps with web technologies. Local filesystem access and native controls, but built with HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, Python, and Ruby. OS X, Linux, Blackberry, iPad, …. I’ve not tried it, but it may be the variation on desktop web apps whose time has come. (via ptorrsmith on Twitter)

Of Tandoori and Epicuration (JP Rangaswami) — Curation is the process by which aggregate data is imbued with personalised trust. Siri — a personal assistant iPhone app, like IWantSandy but with voice recognition. Evaluating the Reasons for Non-use of Cornell University's Institutional Repository — great lessons for all open data projects. The reward structure established by each discipline largely…

Nikki Graziano’s intriguing integration of mathematical curves into her photography sparked a Radar discussion about the relationship between mathematics and the real world. Does her work give insight into the nature of mathematics? Or into the nature of the world? And if so, what kind of insight? Mathematically, matching one curve to another isn’t a big deal. Finding an equation that matches the curve of an artfully trimmed hedge is easy. The question is whether that curve tells us anything, or whether it’s just another stupid math trick.

Bad Census Data, Telephone Fraud, Math Art, and EBook Bugs

Bad Census Data for The Last Decade (Freakonomics blog) — the “representative sample” of statistics data that the Census Bureau releases has apparently been flawed. It’s been used in thousands of studies, and the Census Bureau has refused to correct it.

Modern Telephone Fraud — it’s actually an old fraud updated: an insecure digital PBX used to route expensive calls. Innocent company is whacked with bill at end of month. Interesting questions raised about what we expect company to do (pay?) and telco to do (forgive?). It’s a good reminder that every electronic product is now an avenue for fraud or intrusion, but we don’t plan or contract for these situations.

Found Functions — Nikki Graziano adds mathematics to photographs. Her photos let me see the world through a mathematician’s eyes. (via sciblogs)

Field — a development environment for “experimental code” and digital art. We think that, for many uses, Field is a better Processing than Processing. Includes Python and Java bridges, goal is to connect to as many different programming systems as possible. OS X only at the moment.

Design Principles to Choose the Right Ideas — Often people ask me how we know which ideas to choose from all the hundreds of ideas we’ve generated during brainstorm sessions. Apart from our gut feelings and experience there’s a method that could help us decide: define design principles. Interesting for the different sets of design principles used by Google and Microsoft teams. (via egoodman on Delicious)

Projections (YouTube) — the incredible video projection onto an old English manor house by Kiwi Foo Camp alums The Dark Room.

Where Will Synthetic Biology Lead Us? (New Yorker) — a thoughtful article about the possibilities and cautions of synthetic biology. . “A house pet is a domesticated parasite,” he noted. “ It is evolved to have an interaction with human beings. Same thing with corn”—a crop that didn’t exist until we created it. “Same thing is going to start happening with energy,” he went on. “We are going to start domesticating bacteria to process stuff inside enclosed reactors to produce energy in a far more clean and efficient manner. This is just the beginning stage of being able to program life.”

Business Cards and Crowdsourced Personality Assessments — we scanned images of a person’s business card and asked crowdsourced workers from the Amazon Mechanical Turk channel to write five kind words about the person based on what they saw. I like the idea of being able to crowdsource a quick impartial aesthetic judgement about a design.

When Sears Was a Startup (Pete Warden) — one of the first catalogues from Sears (1897) inspires comparisons to Amazon and other web startups. On a mission with a new business model. They can’t stop talking about how they’re cutting out the middle men who’ve been gouging their customers, with pages devoted to messianic rants against the monopolies trying to put them out of business. They contrast their order fulfillment process (dozens of clerks dealing with tens of thousands of orders a day) with the inefficient country stores full of assistants being paid to idly wait for customers, explaining how they can offer such low prices despite the shipping.

A collection inspired by Science Foo Camp attendees

Endogenous steroids and financial risk taking on a London trading floor (PNAS) — We found that a trader’s morning testosterone level predicts his day’s profitability. We also found that a trader’s cortisol rises with both the variance of his trading results and the volatility of the market. Our results suggest that higher testosterone may contribute to economic return, whereas cortisol is increased by risk. Our results point to a further possibility: testosterone and cortisol are known to have cognitive and behavioral effects, so if the acutely elevated steroids we observed were to persist or increase as volatility rises, they may shift risk preferences and even affect a trader’s ability to engage in rational choice.

The Origin of Universal Scaling Laws in Biology — eye-opening paper that blew my mind. Highlight of Sci Foo was meeting the author and shaking his hand. Relates metabolic rate, size, heart rate, and lifespan by applying physics to biology.

Ushahidi — open source software for managing disasters. The Ushahidi Engine is a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. Our goal is to create the simplest way of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response.

How to Become a Death Of Newspapers Blogger — tongue-in-cheek dig at the recent imminent deaths of newspapers being predicted. Point taken about how unproductive these are: The point’s not to fix anything. It’s to describe the problem more dramatically than the next guy. If Steve Outing says newspapers have a “death spiral” and Clay Shirky predicts “a bloodbath,” the point goes to Shirky. Basically, imagine a group of people watching a building burn down and bickering amongst themselves about whether it’s a conflagration or an inferno. It’s like that, but with consulting fees. (via migurski’s delicious stream)

BarTor, Android BitTorrent with a Twist — take a picture of a DVD’s barcode, it looks up the movie, and sends the torrent file to your desktop to be automatically downloaded. NetFlix should have a legit form of this. If iTunes Movie Store had it, you could have racks of “DVDs” in stores that you could browse and snap to “buy” (giving a cut to the store). This feels monumental.

Artist-Engineer Marc Bohlen uses some fairly advanced technology to express his artistic visions. It's not often you find an artist with a degree from CMU in robotics, or an engineer with an Masters in Art History. Bohlen's projects explore how people and technology interact, ranging from the bickering robots Amy and Klara, to his latest project, the Glass Bottom Float. In advance of his appearance at the E-Tech conference in March, Bohlen talked to us about how he approaches art, and just what art is.

Found in Space — there’s an astronomy bot on Flickr that identifies stars in the night sky, and from the unique positions of the stars figures out what bit of the night sky is looked at and then adds notes for interesting parts of the sky visible in the shot. A brilliant use of computer vision techniques to add value to existing data. (via Stinky).

99 Secrets Twittered — Matt Webb is posting a secret a day from Carl Steadman’s 99 Secrets, an early piece of art on the web. Matt’s explanation is worth reading. Ze Frank really made me realize that every web app is a medium for art, for provoking human responses, and now I keenly watch for signs of art breaking out.

Internet Ephemera — a brief muse on “if we start with the assumption that everything we put online is ephemeral, how does that change what we put online?”